Portrait of Stephen Alonzo Jackson and Other Artworks for Frats

Making t-shirts with custom designs for college fraternities is another idea of Buffalo Jackson’s management purposed to satisfy their young male customers who gravitate towards classic masculine values in fashion opposing today’s fashion trends aggressively promoting men with metrosexual and sleek appearance. A portrait of Stephen Alonzo Jackson was the first artwork created by me for Buffalo Jackson Trading Co’s new series of frat t-shirts.

I never knew about Stephen Alonzo Jackson until Buffalo Jackson commissioned me to create his portrait. Due to this company I learn a lot of things about the United States history. And I am now aware of Stephen Alonzo Jackson being one of the most important men for the Kappa Sigma fraternity as he managed to transform Kappa Sig from a struggling local fraternity at the University of Virginia into a strong international Brotherhood.

Stephen Alonzo Jackson is possibly the most important man in the history of the Kappa Sigma fraternity

I actually love the idea of college fraternities and sororities which we do not have in my country. I believe it feels good to belong to a community, a club which only people sharing the same traditions and common virtues can join. It must be nice to feel the team spirit which helps people withstand competition and encourage support for those brothers in need and troubles. College fraternities and sororities seem to be a powerful institutions making students’ life even more exciting and saturated with positive experience.

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No wonder Buffalo Jackson Trading Co. appeals to college fraternities when advocating their traditional rugged gentleman muscularity expressed in lifestyle and fashion. A lot of fraternity members are prone to respect traditions of past generations and, being conservatives, they are less easily enticed into new fashion trends shifting far from a classic image of a man.

Other Artworks for Colledge Fraternities

The portrait of Stephen Alonzo Jackson is not the only artwork ordered by Buffalo Jackson Trading Co. for fraternities. I also made a few drawings featuring frat crests and badges. You can see some examples below:

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Visual Scribing

My first graphic facilitation commission has not remained unnoticed. Shortly after I had published my blog post about graphic facilitation I was contacted by a representative of CipherEx (a computer consulting services company that designs, models, tests, and builds secure networks) who asked me to create an entire series of graphic facilitation videos to visually capture some important office and network security rules for their customers to remember. The guy who contacted me called this work visual scribing and I think this term, indeed, suits the visual facilitation process which suggests no live drawing. So, from now on I’ll call this kind of work visual scribing or simply scribing.

My new visual scribing commission suggested drawing with an invisible hand

The main challenge in the CipherEx’s assignment was that the customer wanted the drawing hand to be invisible in the final video. I knew that it could be done with some iPad applications which make it possible to record the drawing process through a stylus. However, taking into consideration more important needs, purchasing an iPad was not an option. It took some time to develop my method of the “invisible hand” visual scribing with the equipment available to me at that time. While honing the method I managed to complete the first video of the series in September 2012. And the customer was happy with the result. I’ve got customer’s permission to share this video, so you can watch it below:

Visual Scribing: Security Around the Office

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Astronaut Reading a Book

The drawing of an astronaut reading a book was my first commission from Skip N' Whistle – a company offering eco-friendly screen printed t-shirts in New Orleans, USA. The company is known for its great selection of fun and clever t-shirt designs.

I was asked to draw a spaceman sitting down with his legs crossed and reading a book

One of the reasons why I was contacted by a representative of this company was that guys from Skip N' Whistle were not quite happy with hard edge vector clipart that so many people used to translate their design ideas into drawings. And I cannot but agree that freehand drawings have so much more soul and life than those made with Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator or any other computer-based graphic editor. There is nothing better than a hand-made work totally created by human mind and hands. Hopefully, customers of Skip N' Whistle will appreciate future hand-made designs of their t-shirts. I believe there will be plenty of popular Skip N' Whistle designs re-made into freehand drawings by me and/or other artists because it seems that managers of the company are ready to go for it.

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Another reason I was hired to create the drawing for a t-shirt from Skip N' Whistle was my distinctive drawing style of hatching and cross-hatching making my artworks look somewhat vintage. Skip N' Whistle’s t-shirts and accessories feature a lot of vintage-inspired designs and guys from the company believed that it would be cool to make custom designs while keeping that so popular vintage vibe.

AD ZONE: Read books, watch videos, have fun

Unfortunately, I do not know the exact meaning of this drawing of a reading spaceman but the design looks fun which means that Skip N' Whistle is likely to find a lot of buyers for t-shirts featuring an astronaut with a book.

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Custom Bookmarks

There was a woman from the United States named Kat who asked me to create custom bookmarks for her to use them for her new blog promotion while attending a book convention. Kat is crazy about books and she shares her passion for books on her blog called The Book Tart. Kat wanted two customized bookmarks featuring a reading woman. The woman on the drawing was supposed to look like Kat and be seductive to support her motto – "Reading is Sexy". Well, you have to go an extra mile to revert people back to reading books today and if you are an attractive woman it is easier to do that. I also love those wise phrases she wanted to place on the bookmarks: "Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy books, and that's kind of the same thing" and "I have more books than clothes or shoes – combined".

So I am writing this post to show you how those custom bookmarks look like. The drawings were created on the basis of reference photos and descriptions provided by Kat (including her desire to add some vintage girl vibe to the drawings). These bookmarks are another example of highly customized artworks I can create for personal and business purposes. I can handle the most advanced customization requests as there is nothing that can be more customized than illustrations featuring characters with the portrait similarity to any person. If you are for the fist time on my blog, please, feel free to check some portraits created by me to see what I can offer when highly customized art is needed.

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Custom posters for a chiropractor
Custom greeting card

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